Big data, small data and the omni-channel optimization puzzle

What’s the relationship between big data and omni-channel optimization? Exactly why and how is big data relevant to you? Now Interact’s Test Manager and Data Scientist, Dr Jonathan Salisbury, explains:

Omni-channel optimization lets you target specific segments of your customers — perhaps those who have come from your website and are now talking to one of your call center employees. These customers are the most in need of support: without the right service, they are potentially lost customers, but they are also there to be converted and even upsold.

The problem with small data
One of the challenges of omni-channel optimization is that it relies on only a small part of the data generated by your website.

Let’s say you want test the performance of two landing page designs. You can do an A/B-test and observe the relation between total sales and total visits. These are nice big numbers that allow for the reliable detection of subtle improvements over time.

On the other hand, if you want to optimize across different channels, then the volumes of relevant data decrease substantially. Suddenly, the problem stops being one of handling big data, but rather of making the best use possible of small data.

A question of data volumeFurthermore, if you only want to interact with customers who, for example, contacted the call centre after visiting the website, then the numbers can be very small.

With this smaller, sub-divided data, the duration of a basic A/B-test increases from days to months. The more channels you add, the more sub-divided (and less useful) the data becomes.

Even for a large company generating genuinely ‘Big Data’ the volume relevant to omni-channel optimization might be unacceptably small.

But if you could mine data from multiple sources across many different companies, then you might have an omni-channel optimization advantage.

Big data, bigger insightsOne of the advantages of outsourcing your omni-channel optimization to Now Interact is that we have access to a huge dataset formed of our many different clients’ website analytics. This puts us in a unique position to gain omni-channel insights from multiple large websites and call centers across multiple countries and sectors.

Access to this multinational cross-industry dataset has enabled us to develop a set of world-class prediction algorithms that help us target only the visitors you want to talk to.

With this data, we’ve built up a vast library of interaction design knowledge: what works, what doesn’t and what is worth testing. This allows us to deliver solutions that would be impossible for any one of our customers to create alone.

Every good company employs smart people who can look at their organisation’s data and come to the right conclusions. At Now Interact, we can see our customers’ data in a much wider context, meaning we can perform large-scale tests across multiple websites and deploy improvements that would never be possible with access to only one company’s data.

If you’d like to speak to one of our other data and interaction experts about how big data can improve your customer retention and customer service, contact us today.